Are We Headed Toward World War Three?

For this article, I read eleven articles by eleven different authors. Nearly all of them raised the question of the day: Is the planet headed for World III? But there was one article which truly astounded and scared me. This was “The Warnings of a New World War” by Gilbert Doctorow, the European Coordinator of the American Committee for East West Accord, Ltd. (eastwestaccord@gmail.com)

He discusses the late agreements on Syria between the US and Russia which were broken off in less than a week. In the following bitter period, Putin terminated an agreement made in 2000 to reprocess piles of plutonium which existed in both countries. His government then called for civil defense exercises for 40 million Russian citizens. Russia also sent to Syria its most advanced air defense systems, the S300 and S400. They deployed hypersonic, potentially nuclear-tipped 500 kilometer range Iskander ground-to-ground missiles to Kalingrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

Doctorow then introduced Dmitri Kiselyov, who runs the “single most watched news broadcast in Russia, with tens of millions of listeners.”

Kiselyov opined that the USA is working on the side of Al Nusra, an Islamic reactionary terrorist group. He said that Hillary Clinton’s desire for a Libyan-type no-fly zone in Syria could lead to downed American planes. He talked about a Putin-proposed draft law which would cut NATO troop numbers to those set for September 1, 2000, which would require the US to renounce its hostile policy towards Russia, right the wrongs created by the CIA-backed rightist coup of 2014 in Ukraine, and which would cancel all sanctions and compensate for all the costs to Russia caused by sanctions in the past.

Kiselyov also told about Russia sending three missile-bearing ships to the Mediterranean, which can launch nuclear-tipped 2600-kilometer-range missiles for attacking ground targets, plus the supersonic Oniks for attacking ships. He revealed that Russia is considering the re-establishment of military bases in Cuba and Vietnam. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced that 5,000 paratroopers are to be stationed in Egypt.

My first thoughts after reading the above were that we were in a super crisis. But then I remembered the decision to have the Iraqis and Kurds , supported by US air support, launch an assault to retake Mosul in Iraq from Daesh (a/k/a ISIS). I believe that this may be an effort to move the US away from the crisis in Aleppo, in Syria, until there is a resolution of the 2016 elections. Hopefully this may give us some time to avoid a disaster. The peace movement must step up to demand that Obama and his successor end threats and war preparations against Russia (and China), and that the media stop ignoring them.